A Long Time Coming, But A Change Has Come

In the midst of all the big news of the season–the Sony hack, Ferguson, Eric Garner, cops ambushed, the huge economic numbers–some of the biggest news might just have slipped by unnoticed. More than two thousand years of legal tradition was challenged and overturned in Argentina recently, when a great ape was declared a “non-human person” and granted a writ of habeas corpus. The name of Sandra, a Sumatran orangutan, ought to go down alongside the Magna Carta, Hammurabi and Solon (really, I’m serious) as a benchmark, not just of animal rights but for human progress before the bar.

From Thirteen Hollywood Apes:

The half-dozen orangutans the zoo kept were the old men of the jungle—jowly, massive, and Buddha-like. There were bonobos, too, one of the world’s largest captive populations of the least well known of the great apes. Whenever you caught the gaze of the creatures, they displayed an uncanny sense of having something there, some inner life, intelligent and deep.

That’s what her father had said: “Something there.”

Layla hadn’t said anything.

“Soul,” Eugene Remington had added.

Remington now felt her dad’s “something there” in the eyes of Angle the survivor ape.